An update from outerspace.

Apologies for the late update. Electricity's been inconsistent, and I had an ugly run-in with the Haitian Conch, which I will discuss later. It's a great story though.

Otherwise, things are going well down here. It's bad though. With less than 2 weeks left, I'm beginning to think more about home. Each night before I sleep, I go over what I'm going to do when I get back - step by step. For example, take a shower (Haitians use buckets), play with pico, and go see how many pullups I can do now at the gym.

Classes are going really well. We changed gears today from reading comprehension and grammar to listening comprehension and speaking. TOEFL has a section where you listen to a conversation or a speech, and you have to answer questions afterwards. There's another section where you're given a series of topics, and you have 15 seconds to prepare a 45 second response to the topics. So today we practiced both. Thankfully Pastor Brian had a spare CD player. They really love this stuff - these simple things (the TOEFL book, CD, and CD players) are things that are extremely hard to access in Haiti. Both rare and extremely expensive. The brightest student in my class wakes up between 4 to 5am, walks up onto the roof of his house and uses the morning sunlight to study.

I walked outside onto the balcony today at around 5:30pm and there was a kid next door on his roof reading something. "Pastor Brian, what's he doing?" "Studying."

My afternoon class is also going well. I've decided that if I'm not going to come away with them having learned a lot of English, then at least I'm going to come away with them having had a good time and laughed a lot, and having read some of the Bible. They love Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. Actually, a lot of Haitians love these Kung Fu flicks. You walk down the street and at least one person cries out "Jackie Chan!" As part of their homework each night, I make them write part of the Bible.

I've also had the opportunity to travel around Haiti at night. It's a different world. All of those billions of people who are out in the streets during the day doing whatever they are doing, are also out at night unwinding. Konpa music (specific Haitian beat) is blasted at every corner. It's completely dark except for the natural dark blue of night, and everyone is everywhere just walking around and talking. People squat around small fire pits having corn, and they just relax.

It's not safe though, particularly for two lone Asian guys. Though everyone seems to be out having a good time, there are still police officers with M4's standing at each major intersection. Pretty intimidating. It's good to think of it like the movie "I Am Legend." If the sun goes down, the bad guys come out.


A few local boys we met during a walk to Bill's.